tkDocViewer 2.0.2

Document viewer widget for Tkinter

tkDocViewer is an inefficient, yet practical, Tkinter widget for displaying file previews.

It supports a variety of document and image formats; see below for the complete list. Support for new formats can be added through a modular backend system.

Both Python 2 and 3 are supported, on Windows and Unix platforms.

Development Status

tkDocViewer is deprecated. If PDF support is important to your project, please use a better toolkit than Tk.

I created tkDocViewer to fill a particular need using the tools I had available at the time. It does the job, but there are better alternatives offering greater accessibility, lower resource consumption, and broader file format support. If your project is open-source I recommend you check out Poppler, which is actively maintained and provides bindings for several popular languages and toolkits.

Usage

tkDocViewer consists of a single module, tkdocviewer (note the module name is lowercase), which exports a single class, DocViewer.

A brief example program:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from tkinter import *
from tkdocviewer import *

# Create a root window
root = Tk()

# Create a DocViewer widget
v = DocViewer(root)
v.pack(side="top", expand=1, fill="both")

# Display some document
v.display_file("example.pdf")

# Start Tk's event loop
root.mainloop()

For detailed documentation, try python3 -m pydoc tkdocviewer.

Supported Formats

Note: Most file formats require third-party modules or external applications to be present at runtime. tkDocViewer will still work without them, but file format support will be limited by what's available on your system.

Document Formats

Format	Extensions	Requirements	Notes
PDF	.pdf	Ghostscript
Plain text	.txt	none
Postscript	.ps	Ghostscript
XPS	.xps	Ghostscript, GhostXPS	OpenXPS has not been tested.

Image Formats

Format	Extensions	Requirements	Notes
Bitmap image	.bmp, .pcx	Pillow
GIF	.gif	Pillow	Animations are displayed as individual frames.
JPEG	.jpe, .jpg, .jpeg	Pillow
PNG	.png	Pillow
Netpbm	.pbm, .pgm, .pnm, .ppm	Pillow
Targa	.tga	Pillow
TIFF	.tif, .tiff	Pillow	Supports multi-page documents.
Windows icon	.ico	Pillow
X bitmap	.xbm	Pillow